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If you follow either technology or publishing news, you must be aware of multiple scandals of mainstream publishers publishing AI books as "original work", and in one case, a major literary prize going to a clearly AI-written short story.
In addition to the plain embarrassment, and genuine concern
for genuine writers -- Amazon has now limited self-publishing books to a rate of only three -- a day! -- this presents tremendous copyright and legal concerns -- today, a tool says something is not AI written, tomorrow it is, etc.
Short of using that old Smith Corona, software/hardware combo that records the typing process such that it can be proven to be "thought" and not "retyping" driven, and certainly not cut & pasted, to be presented as "proof" of originality.
Author site is live for those that are interested. No AI there whatsoever.
So, so hawkword
https://www.hawkword.com/
[theircompetitor, Jul 03 2026]
TypingDNA
https://www.typingdna.com/
"Recognize people by the way they type"- ironically, AI-based; and shamefully, I found it by using an LLM :( [bhumphrys, Jul 04 2026]
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If it's good, does it matter? |
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it's a great question. It doesn't seem to matter for chess, where no human can beat AI anymore. |
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But does it matter for stories? I think it does. |
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First, yes, [theircompetitor] can write well. Respect on that point. |
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But from a half-baking point of view, I looked for something that would catch typing cadence, and saw nothing. So ... thwarted pineapple? |
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I've thought something like this could be used to detect cheating in word/math/etc puzzles. Not necessarily the length of a pause, but the tempo of leaving/returning/entering successfully could be sussed out to indicate 'book' or research time. |
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Morse Code receivers could tell who the sender was by the 'hand.' |
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This idea is the converse; a positive proof of life. (But cheating could be a positive proof of life, too?) |
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The thing is, presumably any detector to detect human input at the other end of the wires, can be easily fooled by an "AI" agent which has been trained on human input. |
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i.e. if I train it by letting it watch my typing cadence and pauses and deletions of mispellled words etc. then it will soon be able to defeate a "proof of life" detector by imitating my own typing style in real life with newly generated "AI" bullshit text. |
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//But does it matter for stories? I think it does.// |
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Well it matters to you as a producer of stories, since you don't want dumb bullshit generating algorithms to eat your lunch. But the wider point is that for the consumer of stories reading print text on a screen or piece of paper, I think that if they can't tell if it was human generated or automatically generated bullshit, then it matters little whether the text was originally entered into a keyboard by a Human, or generated by a Bullshit machine. |
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I really believe this, because other than the text itself, the reader has no other way to tell if they think the text is any good or not, except for their own reaction to it. If they react "that is bullshit" then even that doesn't tell them whether it was generated by a human brain or a machine algorithm. |
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To my mind, if (like me) you value human connection and abhor your brain being filled with machine-generated shite, then all this means is that printed books no longer are trustable sources of Human data to upload into your brain. This means you either restrict yourself to books printed before say 10 years ago, or if you want new stories you have to actually seek out and visit the storyteller. |
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Of course at some point convincing humaniform robots will be produced, so even going to sit in front of a storyteller and hear them speak in person will be no guarantee that there is any human connection. |
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well by then maybe we can upload ourselves into their positronic brains :) |
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That would merely create a duplicate (unless of course you deleted the original) |
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//If it's good, does it matter?//
The issue isn't really about the quality of the literature (or any other art for that matter) but about fraudulent selling. The reason that publishers are doing this is because if they clearly labelled the product as AI generated then nobody would buy it. They might argue that the quality of the published product is good & that this is therefore unfair but if I published a book & claimed it was written by, say, Agathie Christie then I could be facing criminal charges & a possible prison sentence.
On the other hand, you might like to consider that classical painter Rembrandt had a factory full of assistants pumping out paintings in his style & he just did the finishing touches & signed them. So the issue is not entirely new, it's just that AI has brought it into sharper focus. |
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One thing I have noticed about creatives complaining about AI is that their objections are always things people do equally much.
AI trains on stuff it's seen. Oh really? So no artist would ever learn from another work, or use a reference for anything? |
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It's pretty common to see artists or musicians talking about how AI should only be used for certain things, and not for others. And mysteriously it's always their discipline which is the one to be forbidden. |
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And there's a lot of talk about how AI will 'never' be able to produce quality work, human output will always be superior. I think that's just cope. |
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So really it's just self interest. I don't think that's an unreasonable concern, but I don't see why creatives should be special-cased over all the other jobs which have experienced automation. |
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It's been fascinating to watch the community respond to people using AI. First they ignored it. Then they laughed at it. Now they're fighting it.
I don't think that's a stance they can hold indefinitely. |
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To differentiate AI from human output, don't you have to define some things which have been elusive in human makeup? |
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There's the ineffable quality we like to ascribe to ourselves that sets us well apart from the other beings/creatures/lifeforms. Trouble is, we don't know what that is. Every time we find the "Easter Egg" quality in humans that is the game-changing, unique thing we do or have, we find the same damn thing in other critters. Tools, language, math, genders, etc., they all fall to further examination. |
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If we can't define it we can't forbid or require it. We won't be able to recognize it when/if it happens in AI, and the sparky moment of AI achieving consciousness may just slip by us, like not knowing for thousands of years that pigeons can count. |
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//First they ignored it.// |
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Ah yes, it's as Gandhi said: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then the crippling cost of your infrastructure destroys your business model. |
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Funny, I just posted a poem online a few days ago in Hebrew (intelligence is in the female , that says more or less: |
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It wasn't I who wrote this poem,
it was AI,
who didn't really understand what I wanted,
she made it a bit too artificial.
(Intelligence - in Hebrew Binah, is in the feminine grammatical gender)
Too slow, and too official.
(the original Hebrew rhyme: A bit too slow, if you look at it.) |
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No lines
with sophisticated rhymes. |
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At least now you know
that I didn't write this poem,
and it isn't you reading it.
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I asked AI if it could write a poem like that. It replied: |
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This poem wasn't penned by my hand,
But by an algorithm's cold command.
It missed the nuance I sought to convey,
Leaving an artificial, stiff display.
Too sluggish and formal in its tone,
Lacking the wit I might have shown.
You now perceive that I am not the source,
And you aren't reading human words, of course. |
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Oh well... I won't explain the last line to it, because it won't remember what I said. |
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The major prize winner was chosen through AI. That's why. |
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Advertisement for theircompetitor's stories. |
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